This invention is related in general to the field of computer software, and more particularly, to a livestock inventory and materials system with an interactive graphical user interface.
When managing livestock and materials used by livestock, it is imperative but extremely difficult to keep an inventory system current and accurate. The conventional inventory system uses a text-based user interface that typically involves a menu of inventory activities, for example, animals movements, incoming animals, outgoing animals, incoming materials, and material usage. Both livestock and materials inventories can be quite complex. For example, livestock inventories must accurately represent the type of animal, and its breed, sex, origination, age, size, and many other characteristics in addition to current and past locations. To know what animals and materials are at what locations, for example, the user must either run a paper report or look up the current inventory on a screen, and then switch to an activity entry menu or screen to enter the movement or other required activity. When the user is entering the activities he/she is no longer able to see the inventory. After entering the activity, the user must return to the inventory report or screen again to verify that the activity just entered was processed correctly by pulling the correct item from a first location and moved (in example of the movement activity) the item to the correct second location. Multiple reports including summaries and detail of both source location and destination location must be run and laid next to each other to understand the overall hierarchical relationships of the inventories as well as the detailed information.
With some activities, characteristics of livestock also changed during the activity and therefore the user must run even more reports to view the inventory from various views and characteristics (again, summary and detail of multiple characteristics) to verify that the activity was input and processed correctly. All of these user interactions must be done to verify just a single entered activity. With this conventional approach, inventory maintenance is extremely time consuming and the inventory is often inaccurate or not up to date.
These conventional systems typically require a user with strong computer skills to use and maintain the inventory. Therefore, often the person that manages the inventories must fill out paper forms which are then given to the computer-skilled person to input. The computer-skilled user then reconciles the data and may have to call back to the manager for more information if the reported activities have errors. The inventory manager then must verify the resulting current inventory for accuracy. This process results in more inaccuracy and double or triple the man-hours. Further, the inventory manager does not know the current inventory until the computer-skilled office personnel enters the data and obtains an updated report to the inventory manager. Therefore, the inventory manager often does not have the most up to date view of the inventory available.
In summary, livestock managers were limited by inaccurate inventories for which the staff was spending a large effort attempting to maintain.
Therefore, a need has arisen for a system and method of livestock and material inventory tracking and management that provides an interactive graphical user interface that not only provides the user different views or data summaries of the data, but also allows the user to easily change the data to reflect completed business transactions and also to enter new data. It is desirable for the user to see the current data at all times while he/she is changing data or entering new data. It is also desirable to allow the user to easily change the criteria and scope for the data to be displayed.
In one aspect of the invention, an interactive graphical user interface window of a livestock and materials inventory system includes a first window operable to display a hierarchical tree structure representation of inventory data, and a second window operable to display a data summary associated with a selected node in the hierarchical tree structure.
In another aspect of the invention, a livestock and material inventory system comprises a database storing inventory data, at least one data explorer operable to access predetermined portions of data in the database, and a graphical user interface operable to display data accessed by the at least one data explorer to a user. The graphical user interface includes a first window operable to display a hierarchical tree structure representation of the inventory data, and a second window operable to display a data summary associated with a selected node in the hierarchical tree structure.
In yet another aspect of the invention, a method of tracking livestock and materials inventory includes the steps of selecting a business application environment, selecting a data explorer having access of specific predetermined sets of data in a database, organizing and displaying the accessed data in a hierarchical tree structure in a first window following a selected organizational criteria and in response to the selected business application environment, selecting a node of the hierarchical tree structure, and displaying data summaries associated with the selected node in a second window.
A technical advantage of the present invention is the interactive graphical user interface that not only displays the data in a user-specifiable organizational manner, but also allows the user to easily enter a business transaction by drag and drop methods. The graphical user interface allows the user to set and change any number of criteria for displaying and summarizing the data. A further technical advantage of the present invention is the multi-tiered and modular architecture of the system that allows future business applications and data explorers to be developed with substantially shortened development time. A generic data explorer object is used to instantiate function-specific data explorers so that the data explorers share common properties and provide a common and seamless presentation to the user.